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Crushing Local SEO Competition: A Case Study

You probably realize that you can do more online to help your own local-based business, but you may not be sure where to start. Keep reading as we take a look at a local moving company’s efforts and provide plenty of advice you can apply to your own company’s web presence.

Back at the end of February I wrote a couple of articles regarding local SEO where I reviewed a site. The articles were Local SEO: Secrets to Killing the Competition and Dominating Local SEO. I took a website, pepetileinstallation.com in south Jersey, and showed what he was doing right and wrong, and what he could do to crush his competition and gain more business.

I’ve decided to turn this into a monthly series. Once a month I’ll look at a site and give exact tips and strategies that could be put in place to gain more business. Understand that these sites are going to be picked somewhat at random; they are not simply client sites where I’m being paid to consult for the site. Instead, they are sites that, for whatever reason, I’ve stumbled across.

Search on “colorado springs moving” or even “colorado springs moving companies” and you’ll see that these guys rank near the top, but not quite at the top. In fact, for the second term I just gave, they are listed third.

This company spends nothing on AdWords, in comparison to both of the companies above them, who do.

So what is this company doing to get them good search rankings?

1. They have a blog with articles on it.

2. The have a Google+ page with a fair amount of content on it.

3. Their Yelp, yellowpages.com, and other accounts are fully up to date.

4. They are doing social bookmarking of the content they create.

5. Social icons are near the top of the page with some social proof (number of likes) right where you can see it.

Doing nothing more than that, they have decent search rankings at the same time they spend less than their competitors. They have followers of their G+ account (which means even better search rankings to those folks), and traffic to their blog, plus a fair amount of links.

What they actually have, however, is people that are interested in moving who are really kind of looking to them for answers. This probably explains why Arrow is growing, while their better ranked competitors are struggling.

{mospagebreak title=How Arrow Can Improve Their Online Appeal}

There are, however, several things that they could be doing much better which would help them land even more business with even less effort.

1. The content of their blog doesn’t have specific tie-ins to moving. They have a post on staying hydrated, but it’s from a general perspective. Every post should have a specific reference to the moving process.

Further, there are some glaring content omissions, such as why someone should use a professional mover in the first place, or differences in types of moving insurances and riders on those policies. They could become a friend to every mover, making themselves look like de facto experts in the space, and therefore be chosen over and above their competition.

2. Their Facebook icon links to a Facebook page with only about eight “likes” to the page, compared to 28 “likes” for their web page. That number is divergent enough that it looks more than a little odd. The social proof that they built on their web page gets smashed if someone is a Facebook user but doesn’t care about Google+ to see that they have nearly 50 followers there (which is a lot for a local moving company).

3. Their social media posts are odd. Almost none of them have anything to do with moving at all. Honestly, I’m not going to follow a local moving company to find out what’s going on with the Denver Broncos unless the company would have an inside track from some reason (which they clearly do not).

4. I can’t find any testimonials from any of their past customers anywhere. A company with their relatively decent social media following should have some kind of testimonials. Compare that to their biggest local competition (Two Men and a Truck) and their somewhat extensive number of testimonials, and Arrow is probably almost literally giving customers away they should be getting.

Despite some fairly significant things that the company is doing wrong, let me reiterate that what they are doing is still allowing them to beat their competition in the search engines at the same time they spend less in advertising (at least in AdWords advertising).

Not only that, but by at least attempting to use their blogs to answer potential questions or problems, they demonstrate expertise and therefore gain customers that their competitors are losing to them, because those other folks have standard “milk-toast” sites that don’t really give any information at all.

That’s all I have room for today. Make sure to come back tomorrow, when I’ll discuss what this company should be doing to capture more customers and become THE moving authorities in Colorado Springs.